Transvisionary Translating

By 1850 Hawthorne had developed the ideas he took from Balzac into his first novel and best seller, The Scarlet Letter. Melville, who was exploring similar traits in Redburn and White-Jacket became inspired by Hawthorne’s financial success and took the opportunity through an idea afforded by common affiliation with Young America to review Hawthorne’s work in the context of a unique national literature. His essay emphasized the “blackness” then attributed to Balzac with Hawthorne and hinted that an American author should not “write like a Frenchman,” suggesting Hawthorne may have only adopted this affectation to create “wondrous effects” in his writing. Simultaneously with the publication of Melville’s essay, Balzac died; and French laureate Victor Hugo praised him in a remarkable eulogy of consecration retranslated worldwide. After having met with Hawthorne on a few occasions, Melville decided to move near him and continue literary/ontological discussions. Over the next eighteen months, Melville modified the whaling novel he was composing to reflect as much unité de composition as he could. Together they worked on novels developing the first experiments in what would develop into American Realism twenty years before it articulation by Henry James and William Dean Howells.